Create circular pulse animaion in swift

What is pulse animation in iOS?

As its name describes, 'Pulse animation' is an animation the comes and go just like a wave of water. The animation start gradually and fades away as its reach its end time. For more visualized example of pulse animation in iOS please, look at the image below.

In this tutorial, we will learn how to create pulse animation using swift language in iOS (will create exactly same screen as shown the exemplary image above). So let's start the tutorial

Steps to create pulse animation in swift :

Step 1: Create a new Xcode project, we are using "single view application" template for the tutorial.

Step 5: Assign "avatar" image to UIImageView. You can grab a copy of the avatar assets from here.

Step 6: As we are all set up with our design part let's dive into the most interesting part of this tutorial, i.e. creating pulse animation in iOS using swift language.

Step 7: Since, we are creating a circular pulse animation so for this we also need our object which acts as a pulse origin, to be circular too, in our case its avatar imageView. So make UIImageView circular.

Step 8: Its time to create pulse layer, so we will create a new function and named it "createPulse". Below is the code that creates pulse

In above code, we created a circular path using UIBezierPath, setting following parameters as1) arc center of the circular path to zero initially though we will set center of our circular pat later on. 2) Radius of the circular path will equals to the width of your pulse animation divides by 2 i.e how long you want the pulse to go and then fades away.3) Start angle of the circular path will be zero so that it starts from its initials point.4) End angle will be 2 *.pi5) Direction of circular path will be clockwise, it tells whether layer draws itself clock wise or anticlockwise

As we are done with circular path , we need to create a layer using CAShapeLayer class that will act
as our pulse. Assign the properties to layer object as shown in the code above and finally add the layer to our avatar UIImageView layer. This is required as our avatar UIImageView acts as origin of pulse. Lastly, add layer to the array too.

Step 9: Call the "createPulse" function inside viewDidLoad function.

Animate Pulse around avatar UIIMageView:

If you run the app, at this point then you will see only one circle. As all the circular layers are added on top of each other. To animate layer as pulse, we are required to add two type of animations to the layer

1) Scale Animation :- required to scale the layer to outwards

2) Opacity animation:- required to fade the layer as it moves towards its full scale

Below is the code that adds the above two animations to the layer

The above code is self explanatory, if you have any concerns or doubts then please feel free to ask then in comments.

In order to start animation we need to call the "animatePulsatingLayerAt" function as shown below

Complete code for creating pulse animation in swift:

Where to go from here

If you run the app, you will see that pulse animation is working nicely, if not then please follow the steps again. In this tutorial we learned how to create pulse animation in swift. If you have any concerns then please let us know through comments section. Thanks :)